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Approximants are speech sounds that involve the Speech organ approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision, citing to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and , which produce no turbulence. This class is composed of sounds like (as in rest) and semivowels like and (as in yes and west, respectively), as well as lateral approximants like (as in less).
In phonology, approximant is also a distinctive feature that encompasses all except nasal consonant, including , Tap consonant, and Trill consonant.
Vowels and their corresponding semivowels alternate in many languages depending on the phonological environment, or for grammatical reasons, as is the case with Indo-European ablaut. Similarly, languages often avoid configurations where a semivowel precedes its corresponding vowel., citing A number of phoneticians distinguish between semivowels and approximants by their location in a syllable. Although he uses the terms interchangeably, remarks that, for example, the final glides of English par and buy differ from French par ('through') and baille ('tub') in that, in the latter pair, the approximants appear in the syllable coda, whereas, in the former, they appear in the syllable nucleus. This means that opaque (if not minimal) contrasts can occur in languages like Italian language (with the i-like sound of piede 'foot', appearing in the nucleus: , and that of piano 'plane', appearing in the syllable onset: ) and Spanish (with a near minimal pair being abyecto 'abject' and abierto 'opened').
In articulation and often diachronically, palatal approximants correspond to , velar consonant approximants to , and labialized approximants to . In American English, the rhotic consonant approximant corresponds to the rhotic vowel. This can create alternations (as shown in the above table).
In addition to alternations, glides can be inserted to the left or the right of their corresponding vowels when they occur next to a hiatus. For example, in Ukrainian, medial triggers the formation of an inserted that acts as a syllable onset so that when the affix is added to футбол ('football') to make футболіст 'football player', it is pronounced , but маоїст ('Maoist'), with the same affix, is pronounced with a glide. Dutch language for many speakers has a similar process that extends to mid vowels:
Similarly, vowels can be inserted next to their corresponding glide in certain phonetic environments. Sievers' law describes this behaviour for Germanic.
Non-high semivowels also occur. In colloquial Nepali language speech, a process of glide-formation occurs, where one of two adjacent vowels becomes non-syllabic; the process includes mid vowels so that ('cause to wish') features a non-syllabic mid vowel. Spanish features a similar process and even nonsyllabic can occur so that ahorita ('right away') is pronounced . It is not often clear, however, whether such sequences involve a semivowel (a consonant) or a diphthong (a vowel), and in many cases, it may not be a meaningful distinction.
Although many languages have , which lie between back/velar and front/palatal , there are few cases of a corresponding approximant . One is in the Korean diphthong or though it is more frequently analyzed as velar (as in the table above), and Mapudungun may be another, with three high vowel sounds, , , and three corresponding consonants, , and , and a third one is often described as a non-labialized voiced velar fricative; some texts note a correspondence between this approximant and that is parallel to – and –. An example is liq (?) ('white').Listen to a recording
It has been noted that the expected symbols for the approximant correlates of are Martin Ball & Joan Rahilly (2011) The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA. Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 41 (2), pp. 231–237 or . (2025). 9780805853636, Psychology Press. ISBN 9780805853636
For places of articulation further back in the mouth, languages do not contrast voiced fricatives and approximants. Therefore, the IPA allows the symbols for the voiced fricatives to double for the approximants, with or without a lowering diacritic.
Occasionally, the glottal "fricatives" are called approximants, since typically has no more frication than voiceless approximants, but they are often of the glottis without any accompanying manner or place of articulation.
argue that [[Burmese|Burmese language]] and [[Standard Tibetan]] have voiceless lateral approximants and [[Navajo|Navajo language]] and [[Zulu|Zulu language]] voiceless lateral fricatives , but also say that "in other cases it is difficult to decide whether a voiceless lateral should be described as an approximant or a fricative". compared voiceless laterals in [[Estonian Swedish]], Icelandic, and [[Welsh|Welsh language]] and found that Welsh-speakers consistently used , that Icelandic-speakers consistently used , and that speakers of Estonian Swedish varied in their pronunciation. They conclude that there is "a range of variants within voiceless laterals, rather than a categorical split between lateral fricatives and voiceless approximant laterals".
In Portuguese, the nasal glides and historically became and in some words. In Edo language, the nasalized allophones of the approximants and are nasal occlusives, and .
What are transcribed as nasal approximants may include non-syllabic elements of or diphthongs.
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